Planetkill, page 20
‘Dead…’ rasps the spirit. ‘Dead… to… break formation, break! Disperse and all ahead! What?!’
‘It’s talking to itself, Torv, it’s fragmenting! Kill it! I warn you, in about another two minutes our chances evaporate!’
‘That wasn’t the spirit,’ comes Torv’s reply, the first time she has ever heard strain in his voice. ‘That was a bound warpcaller. Somewhere nearby.’
Drael stares past him out the window. The planet has grown to swallow more than half the view. Soon she will not be able to see space around it. And then it will go from a flat disc to a curved horizon, and then it will be ground rushing up…
‘Move us!’ she roars. ‘If you know what’s good for you, then–’
Then she’s drowned out by another voice, bursting from bulkhead and deck, her whole ship a hellish sounding-board for the growling, sobbing note that shakes Drael to her knees. Her eyes run, her muscles spasm, she retches for breath.
Then a voice, human, not psychic but mechanical, crackling words on the general vox band.
‘Can’t break away, please, can someone–’ and it sinks into a shriek of shrieking static. Startled, Drael looks up in time to see a white spark bloom and fade on the onrushing rogue, a ghost-ring of blastwave puffing out from it and fading. She was wrong. There were ships waiting out there, and they’re being brushed aside by a planet bulleting at them faster than they can manoeuvre.
‘Spirit! Want the pleasure of killing me yourself? Then turn us now!’ Another plasma-flash lights up the planet’s face. ‘You hear? Fifteen roll to port and climb twenty on pitch! Now! Now!’
And the spirit obeys. The starfield slides across the window. The rogue’s lower curve is lost to sight now, and Drael can make out the shadows that the next explosion causes as she shouts for ten more degrees and all ahead full, full, open the damn engine ‘til it howls!
And howl the Blind Betrayer does, not just the machine-spirit but the surviving crew, minds already bent and now bodies broken by the force of the turn against weakened motion dampers. Howls over the vox as the last two ships of the spirit’s ally-squadron succumb to the rogue world’s velocity and are dashed apart. Howls from Blind Betrayer’s very body as it wrenches itself around without a functional crew to modulate the fire through its steering-tubes or adjust the gravitic fields that soothe the stresses on its hull.
Drael never sees the world’s broken face speed by, or the blaze around her craft’s prow as they skim the thinning atmosphere. It seems a long time before the crushing force abates, leaving her on her hands and knees on the floor.
Coldheart has fallen against an empty servitor pedestal, all his regal bearing gone.
‘Torv?’ Drael croaks, hating the falter in her voice. ‘Get it while it’s still… weak.’ Although she will never admit it, it has occurred to her that she may owe Xana’s treachery her life. If the spirit had not been strengthened by the priests who seduced it to mutiny, it might not have been powerful enough to withstand the rogue planet’s blast of agony in time to turn her ship. She tries to chuckle at the irony, and hunches over into a burst of coughs instead. ‘Torv?’
‘Calm yourself, Ashya. It’s not fighting.’
‘What?’
‘If it does, I’m ready for it. But it’s not resisting me. Its allies are gone, that thing killed them. There’s no help on the way for it any more. We’ve really won.’
Barely noticing the protests of her strained body, she stands upright, breathes deeply. The spirit breaks the silence.
‘If you please, madam captain, let us discuss terms.’
As they coast away from the pitted surface of the rogue, Ashya Drael puts her hands on her hips, leans back and shouts with laughter.
It does not feel the plasma explosions, which score not living hide but cold rock. Uhlguth is a whale beached on the shores of reality, its life guttering out in the sterile vacuum of a cosmos it was never meant to enter. It is too late to turn back, the damage is too deep. With a final groan and thought of its master, Uhlguth dies.
View the Seventh: The Vision of Erechoi
Every sixteen seconds the ocular arrays chime softly as their images flow into the datacores. Every thousand and twenty-eight seconds the sentinel auspex adds a hushed note like a funeral bell. Every twelve seconds the augury engines on the lateral masts gong to show they are still focused and recording. The delicate gamelan note every seven hundred and sixty-eight seconds comes from the passive sensors, reporting that they see nothing outside their alert parameters. And once every four thousand, one hundred and twelve seconds comes the harp-like cascade of notes to say that the ship’s foundation systems are still in harmony according to their Machine-God-ordained place.
These are the sounds by which Mareos Erechoi, captain of the explorator ship Jeushin’s Peerless Intellect, measures out his days.
Erechoi’s limbless body glides on its maglev track down the processional aisle of the Intellect’s bridge, through the prickly tang of incense fumes. His head is held regally high by a spinal scaffold of brushed titanium that reflects the devotional lanterns adorning the bridge’s altars. Each lantern is also a readout, each altar both ceremonial shrine and terminal for the thrumming data-engines in the decks below. Functionality and holiness. Erechoi would be offended at the idea that they were divisible.
Erechoi has finished the prayers he says every four hundred thousand seconds, and now he is performing communion with his congregation of devices. His eyes are gently closed as though he were just resting them for a moment, although he has not opened them for nearly eighty years. His lips curve in a faint, perpetual smile, and a haze of thin white hair puffs out from his mahogany-brown scalp. By Mechanicus standards such careless organic untidiness is censurable, but Erechoi has performed his offices flawlessly for decades and, just between himself and his Machine-God, he doesn’t think a head full of hair is doing any harm.
In his youth Erechoi was a vanguard scout for the militant orders of his Cult, blade-sharp, rigid in his devotions. Now, on the peaceful downslope of his years, he is grateful for this duty. A realspace astrocartography sweep, a long quiet voyage to rendezvous with a Mechanicus tender bringing the Navigator to guide him home. A serene hermit’s vigil amongst the grandeur of the stars. The young Erechoi would have abominated the idea of finding pleasure in beauty, but that is another thing that the old Erechoi privately believes is doing no harm.
When Erechoi contemplates the delicate light of a dust cloud in which infant stars are hatching, or the diamond stab of a nova through the deep black, he can almost forget the thing whose borders he is measuring, the festering thing that fills the starfield to port with shifting, colourless, somehow slimy light. The duty Erechoi hates most is cleansing the auspexes that must look in that direction, but it is a duty he knows better than to neglect. His priesthood has scarring experience of the consequences of letting any gaze, human or machine, dwell on the Eye of Terror for too long.
But thankfully, it is not time for that now. Now he is on his way to the belvedere at the processional’s end, where he will join his consciousness to the observatory dome and drink in the sight of the heavens for hours. The routine of tens of years, a routine of soothing contentment, until one of the port-side sentinels pings.
Erechoi twitches at the distraction, chafing at anything coming between him and his stars. But it’s the port sensors, which have signalled him, the ones with the most dangerous duties. Erechoi scolds himself for his reluctance. His machines need him.
He smoothly reverses direction up the processional, his transmitter vanes speaking to the Intellect’s systems. Erechoi surveys initial reports, dismisses them, demands confirmation, looks and looks again. But this is no apparition, not the imagination of his greying old head, not – shameful suspicion! – a mechanical flaw. Something is emerging from the Eye.
Erechoi’s face does not move, but his mind races. Long-neglected contingency responses are brought online, ready to be loaded into Erechoi’s mind, as augmetic grips lift him from his rail into the high altar’s torso socket. With soft puffs the essence-burners at the six corners of the altar ignite, fans pushing the sharp scent through the air. Two metal gargoyles unfold themselves from the floor and take up a catechism of fortitude in chirruping machine-code. Reassured by the feeling that his deity is nearer him now, Erechoi turns the Intellect’s eyes to the thing that has managed to escape from the hellish aurora to port.
It is a planet.
Erechoi’s first reaction is to disbelieve his eyes – blasphemous to doubt his machines, perhaps, but he knows not even machines are immune to the lies of that fever-mad storm. But no, there is no doubt. A planet.
And sacred sands of Mars! How fast is it? Already it’s clear of the Eye and into real space. Erechoi fires out orders, fine-tuning the Intellect’s senses, bringing powerful analytical disciplines out of dormancy and into his mind. The planet will not be visible long, and his report must be perfect.
It is a rough thing, pitted and scarred in strange ways. It has a lurid shine, but when Erechoi has a cogitator compensate for the light drooling from the Eye, its true colour is a dead grey. Radio and thermal scopes are silent: this world gives off no energy, no transmissions, no radiation, not even the heat from a molten core.
Magnified picts begin to flow to the data-arks, and Erechoi gazes at them in fascination. Spattered across the lead hemisphere (whose seams and contours form a pattern that Erechoi must resist thinking of as a face) are large craters, smooth-bottomed and blur-edged. It takes the data-looms of the lower decks ninety-seven seconds to find that the shapes match records of plasma explosions on the scale of a starship’s furnace core. Down one flank runs a monstrous gouge from some glancing impact of planetary scale that must surely have meant the extinction of every living thing on that world and this. Behind it comes a trail of debris from the disintegrating rogue mixed with strangely-shaped space litter caught in its gravity. There is a risk to allowing the refuse of the Eye to lodge too firmly in his ship’s senses, but Erechoi prays to his Machine-God that he can safely take it. He does not realise that he is shivering as he does so.
Shadows throw into relief tectonic plates that bulge like petrified muscles. The light brings out strange, stippled craters which Erechoi puzzles over, wondering why they look familiar. Later he will realise they resemble not craters on an airless world but parasite-bites on living skin. Interspersed with these are glints of metal and he gasps, the action coming not as a gulp of air through his mouth or nose but as a reflexive uptick in the speed of the aerators mounted in his chair that feed oxygen directly into his blood.
Feverishly he retunes the scopes, trying to push them beyond their highest gain, and the armatures holding his body creak and click: in another oblivious, reflexive gesture Erechoi is trying to hunch forward as he concentrates. The glints are not towers or machines, not the signs he had hoped for of salvage or even some unimaginable lost-tech, just metal hoops, giant arches, scattered across the vacuum-seared landscape according to either no pattern at all or one too esoteric for Erechoi to make out. Some have been distorted or uprooted by the buckling of the surface, and when he sees one that has uprooted completely Erechoi realises the arches are the upper halves of complete, rectangular loops, like gigantic links of chain, although the Omnissiah alone must know where such a mass of metal could be mined or forged.
All too soon, the world passes beneath the Intellect and hurtles on. Erechoi watches it go from a sphere to a crescent to a dwindling shadow against space. His data-looms are already at work and one of the navigational logisters is plotting the vector to the nearest Battlefleet Obscuras listening post, somewhere to aim his warning so an astropath can speed it onwards.
Erechoi sits in thought long after he should have been seeing to his report in person. At first he tells himself it is simple exhaustion after the disruption of his routines, but even after he metabolises a drop of stimulant the sombre feeling persists. Erechoi considers detaching himself from the Intellect’s systems, letting the ship codify its observations of the corpse while he–
Wait, no. He has it. He stops, backtracks, checks his thought-logs, and sees it. Corpse was the term he just used. He reruns scope footage and once again watches the world disappear into the interstellar gulf. A world without life, certainly, but a corpse? What moved him to think of it as an entity?
Silently, Erechoi returns Jeushin’s Peerless Intellect to its course. The faint smile is gone from his lips and his scaffold-chair clicks and fidgets from his distracted thoughts. It will be a long time before serenity returns to him.
Endless dark, endless cold, stars staring unblinking from the far distance. Forever lost and silent, Uhlguth’s remains vanish into the void and chill.
MERCY RUN
Steve Parker
‘If any event in recent years highlights the folly of underestimating the ork warlord, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, it is the woeful mishandling of the Palmeros incident. That a significant part of the 18th Army Group (Exolon) managed to evacuate the planet in time must be scant consolation, if any, to the anguished souls of the billions who did not.’
Excerpted from Old Foe, New Threat – An Assessment of Orkoid Military Developments in the Late 41st Millennium, Praeceptor Jakahn of the Collegium Analytica (Imperial Navy), Cypra Mundi
67 kilometres east-north-east of Banphry, Vestiche Province,
07.12 local (16 hours 35 minutes to Planetkill)
‘For the last bloody time,’ roared Wulfe, ‘make way in the name of the Emperor!’ He sat high in his cupola, squinting into the morning sun. All around his tank, the highway was clogged with shuffling figures, overburdened animals and carts piled so high they looked ready to tip over. The closest refugees tried to make way for Wulfe’s tank, but there was too little room to move. They were hemmed in by the rest of the human tide.
Shouting was futile, Wulfe decided. The old scar on his throat itched like crazy. Scratching it, he looked east, tracing the broad line of shambolic figures all the way to the shimmering horizon. The sky was clear and blue, and the air was warming quickly.
Palmeros. Even after two years of war, much of this world was still rich and green. Clean, fresh air. Pure, crystal waters. He’d thought this world a paradise when the regiment had first landed. What would it be like, he’d wondered, to settle here, find a wife, till the land? Then word of the coming cataclysm had leaked out and things started coming undone. Seventeen massive asteroids, allegedly guided by the will of the ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka, were hurtling towards Palmeros on a deadly collision course.
Desperate masses poured from the cities, marching in their millions to the nearest evacuation zones. Those squeezing past Wulfe’s tank had come from Zimmamar, the provincial capital in the north-east. They followed The Gold Road west towards Banphry. Neither rich nor skilled enough to secure places on the Munitorum’s evacuation lists, they’d find themselves facing lasguns and razorwire when they got there. Every last centimetre of space on the Navy’s ships was already accounted for.
Wulfe’s own regiment, the Cadian 81st Armoured, were already rolling their tanks into the cavernous bellies of the naval lifters that would carry them to the relative safety of space. Not the entire regiment, of course. Not he and his crew – the crew of the Leman Russ battle tank, Last Rites. And not the crews of Steelhearted and Champion of Cerbera, both of which followed close behind, running escort for those damned Sororitas in their unmarked black Chimera.
What did I do, Wulfe wondered, to deserve the honour of leading this Eye-blasted wild-grox chase?
His driver inched Last Rites forward, gunning the engine threateningly but to little effect. The refugees were already doing their best to stand aside. To proceed any faster, Wulfe knew, would mean pulping innocent civilians under sixty tonnes of heavy armour.
Sister Superior Dessembra was hailing him again on the mission channel. He didn’t feel like listening. She’d already ordered him to roll forward, to lead their tanks off the road by crushing anyone in their path, but the thought of it turned Wulfe’s stomach. These people were innocent Imperial citizens, and he was unwilling to stain his hands with their blood.
He watched some of them reach out to touch Last Rites as they passed thinking, perhaps, that the hulking machine’s holy spirit would bless them with a little luck on this final hopeless day. A few craned forward to plant reverent kisses on her thick, olive-painted hull. The sight stabbed at Wulfe’s heart.
He knew the mission clock was ticking. The town of Ghotenz, site of their primary objective, was still almost 200km away. Every second wasted here brought he and his men closer to being stranded, to sharing the planet’s imminent annihilation. His laspistol began to feel heavy on his hip, calling for his attention. Dessembra was right; breaking free of the masses by force was the only option left. The tanks had to get off the road.
A warning shot, he reasoned, might get them moving. He didn’t want to panic them – many would be hurt – but it would be kinder than crushing them.
He lifted his pistol from its holster and thumbed the safety off. Before he could fire, however, screams of terror erupted from behind him. He spun in his cupola to see Champion of Cerbera coughing thick black fumes from her exhausts as she rolled towards the edge of the highway. The old tank pulled dozens of helpless refugees under her, crushing their bones to powder. By the time she reached the roadside, her treads were slick with glistening blood. Cries of anger and grief filled the air.
‘What are you doing, Kohl?’ Wulfe shouted over the vox-link. ‘Those are Imperial citizens!’
